Niwatori wa futatabi naku / 鶏はふたゝび鳴く (‘The Cock Crows Twice’, 1954)

Obscure Japanese Film # 259

Eijiro Tono and Yoko Minakaze

After a man trying to find oil in order to revive the fortunes of his dying seaside town commits suicide, the locals blame Fumiko (Yoko Minakaze), a young woman who had rejected his sudden offer of marriage. Fumiko lives with her father, Tokinosuke (Eijiro Tono, great), who has been going to pieces since his wife ran off with another man. Ostracised by the townsfolk, Fumiko heads towards the sea with the intention of ending it all, but is spotted by an itinerant oil worker (Shuji Sano) who prevents her from going through with it. He and four other men have been left stranded since the suicide of their boss and Fumiko is moved by their kindness and relates to their outside status.

Shuji Sano

Sachiko Hidari, Minakaze and Yoko Kozono

It emerges that Fumiko has two female friends, Yoko (Yoko Kozono/Kosono) and Taniko (Sachiko Hidari), with whom she has made a suicide pact, each carrying a deadly pill in a locket around their necks. Yoko’s reason for being miserable is that she’s the daughter of a concubine (Sadako Sawamura), while Taniko’s is that she’s physically disabled and has to walk with a crutch. The women have agreed that they will all commit suicide together. Meanwhile, the stranded workers are debating whether to flee the town and escape the debts they’ve incurred or stick it out, hoping that a long-awaited telegram will arrive telling them to come to a new oil field. Then Kurama (Yunosuke Ito), an embezzler on the run from the police, arrives and claims to be an oil surveyor who intends to restart the drilling…

Yunosuke Ito

This Shintoho production has an unusual story which is a creation of Rinzo Shiina (1911-73), who wrote the original screenplay and had written the novel on which director Heinosuke Gosho’s Where Chimneys are Seen (1953) had been based. However, there are certain similarities to Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951), which I strongly suspect influenced this film. With all the talk of suicide, it first appears to be a rather bleak drama, but gradually transforms into a comedy. It’s not like any other Gosho film I’ve seen, and I found it quite engaging and charming in the way it takes delight in continually subverting our expectations. For example, when Fumiko’s wealthy aunt who has been turning down her father’s requests for money appears, we expect that she’ll be a terrible harridan – especially as she’s played by Eiko Miyoshi – but this proves not to be quite the case.

Eiko Miyoshi

It’s surprising to see Yoko Minakaze (1930-2007) in the lead role. She doesn’t look like a film star and, indeed, wasn’t one, but for some mysterious reason I felt her lack of star quality somehow worked in this film’s favour. Coming from the theatre, she enjoyed a long career on stage as well as screens both big and small, but this may well be her most major role in movies.

It’s worth noting that screenwriter Rinzo Shiina had converted to Christianity in 1950 and it’s easy to see how his beliefs influenced this work. It’s also perhaps the reason composer Toshiro Mayuzumi used choral music for his score, although this is one element I didn’t particularly care for. In most respects, though, this film is a gem and it’s also beautifully shot by Joji Ohara, who won a Mainichi Film Concours Award for Best Cinematography for his pains, making this a film crying out for a good quality release.

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Asa no hamon / 朝の波紋 (‘Morning Ripples’, 1952)

Obscure Japanese Film #251

Hideko Takamine

Atsuko (Hideko Takamine) is a young woman living at home with her mother (Hisako Takihana) and nephew Kenichi (Katsumasa Okamoto), whose father was killed in the war and whose mother (Kuniko Miyake) works at a hotel in Hakone. Kenichi has become very attached to a stray dog he adopted but which his mother disapproves of due to its habit of stealing the neighbours’ shoes (the implication is that Kenichi feels rather like a stray dog himself). Atsuko works at a small trading company, where one of her ambitious male colleagues, Kaji (Eiji Okada), has developed a crush on her. One day she meets the less serious Inoda (Ryo Ikebe), who has befriended Kenichi and works for a larger trading company, and the two hit it off. However, Kaji’s jealousy, together with a dispute between the two rival companies over a client, threatens to destroy their burgeoning romance…

Ryo Ikebe

Kuniko Miyake

Distributed by Shintoho, this was the second production by director Heinosuke Gosho’s independent production company Studio 8. It was based on a novel of the same name by Jun Takami (1907-65), whose work also provided the basis for the previously-reviewed Love in the Mountains (1959), a similarly modest and sentimental love story about ordinary people.

Although this was far from star Hideo Takamine’s most interesting role, she and Ryo Ikebe make for an appealing pair as they search the post-war rubble of Asakusa in search of Kenichi after he runs away – Asakusa, most of which had been destroyed by bombs, was evidently not yet fully rebuilt in 1952, the final year of American occupation. Incidentally, Takamine speaks English in several scenes here as the company Atsuko works for does most of its business with foreigners. Her modern, independent personality and ability to do her job well is not always appreciated by her male colleagues, including Kaji. who are at times quite condescending towards her.

Eiji Okada

The film is full of quietly effective little moments, such as when Inoda takes a break on the stairwell with his colleague, looks down to see the cleaning woman on the floor below, then turns to look up at the sun shining through the window; although the influence of Western culture is apparent everywhere in the lives of these characters, such mundane details feel a long way from Hollywood.

Among the supporting cast, the best-known face is that of future Akira Kurosawa favourite Kyoko Kagawa, who appears here briefly as a nun.

The copy I watched was a low-res VHS transfer viewable on YouTube here, but I assume the Japanese DVD is better quality. English subtitles courtesy of Coralsundy can be found here.

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Mogura Yokocho / もぐら横丁 (‘Mole Alley’, 1953)

Obscure Japanese Film #244

Shuji Sano

This Shintoho production was based on episodes from a number of autobiographical novels by Kazuo Ozaki (1899-1983), one of which gives this film its title. Ozaki is renamed Kazuo Ogata here and played by Shuji Sano. In the originals, Ozaki was writing about his life as a struggling author in the 1930s before winning the coveted Akutagawa Prize in 1937. Perhaps for budgetary reasons, director Hiroshi Shimizu chose not to recreate the period and, in one scene, Ogata’s wife (played by Yukiko Shimazaki) goes to the cinema to see the 1952 French-Italian co-production The Seven Deadly Sins. However, apart from a few minor details such as this, the film could almost be set in the 1930s as there is no mention whatsoever of the war or of issues specific to the post-war period. Instead, it focuses entirely on the problems of the young couple as they try to find ways of paying the bills and avoiding homelessness while he maintains a writing career and she becomes a mother. 

Yukiko Shimazaki

Ozaki was a respected literary author in Japan, but almost none of his work has been published in English. His mentor was the better-known Naoya Shiga, who has several works published in English, including the novel A Dark Night’s Passing and the collection The Paper Door and Other Stories. Humour and anger at injustice are said to be among the prime characteristics of Ozaki’s work, which Mishima reportedly described as being like ‘Naoya Shiga in a kimono.’ Incidentally, there have been only three other films based on his writing: Koji Shima’s Nonki megane (1940). Tadao Ikeda’s Tenmei Taro (1951) and Seiji Hisamatsu’s Aisaiki (1959), none of which are easily accessible.

Shimizu co-wrote the screenplay with Kozaburo Yoshimura, already a well-established director himself by then, and this film seems to have been their sole collaboration. Shimizu was at this point dividing his time between making his own independent pictures and working for Shintoho. Unsurprisingly for a Shimizu picture, it’s an understated piece which avoids melodrama for the most part and has very little plot but plenty of gentle humour. On the other hand, it’s not one of his most characteristic or memorable films – unlike Tomorrow will be Fine Weather in Japan, for example, which feels like it could only have been made by Shimizu. 

If leading lady Yukiko Shimazaki, who plays Ogata’s rather child-like wife, is unfamiliar, that’s perhaps a symptom of Shimizu’s lack of interest in working with big names – she was not a major star, although she had been active in films from 1950 and went on to appear in Seven Samurai. She was also a chanson singer and, in 1963, she left the film business and opened her own chanson bar in Ginza named Epoch, which she ran for many years. A more familiar face among the supporting cast is Jukichi Uno, who plays a kindly landlord and seems to have appeared in almost every shomin-geki made during this period. 

Jukichi Uno

A note on the title:

As far as I’m aware, ‘Mole Alley’ is not an official English title. While ‘alley’ seems a fair translation of yokocho (which can also be translated as ‘side street’, ‘lane’, etc), mogura can also mean ‘creepers’ or ‘trailing plants’ as well as ‘mole’. Mogura Yokocho is the name of the street that Ogata and his wife move to, but whether that street is named after moles or creepers is unclear.

Bonus trivia:

Three well-known Japanese writers are glimpsed briefly in the Akutagawa Prize ceremony scene: Fumio Niwa, Kazuo Dan, and Shiro Ozaki (no relation to Kazuo Ozaki). 

Japanese DVD to be released 13 May 2026

Thanks to A.K.

Okuman choja / 億万長者 (‘Billionaire’, 1954)

 

Isao Kimura

 

Karoku (Isao Kimura) is a tax collector so self-effacing he barely exists, so it’s easy for the people he’s supposed to collect from to send him away empty-handed. These include an unemployed photographer, Juji (Kinzo Shin), and his wife (Toyo Takahashi), who have 18 children and a lodger, Sute (Yoshiko Kuga). Like Karoku, Sute is an orphan who lost her parents to the atom bomb. She believes that the only way to protect peace is for Japan to have its own nuclear weapons and is now devoting all her energy to making them herself. 

 

Yoshiko Kuga

 

Karuko is attracted to his boss’s liberated daughter, Asako (Sachiko Hidari), who works in the same office, and she inspires him to become more aggressive in his collecting, but this only leads to him being bribed rather than paid. Realising the extent of corruption in the tax business, Karuko is persuaded by scheming geisha Hanakuma (Isuzu Yamada) into keeping a record of all the tax evaders. He intends to use this to expose corrupt politicians like Ebizo (Yunosuke Ito), but she has her own ideas…

 

Isuzu Yamada

 

This Shintoho release was produced by the Young Actors' Club (later known as Gekidan Seihai), which had been founded in 1952 and also produced Satsuo Yamamoto’s Hi no hate the same year. According to Japanese Wikipedia,

Isao Kimura, the lead actor, actually lost his family in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It was Kimura who also appointed Kon Ichikawa as director.

The film was originally intended to be a film adaptation of Marcel Pagnol's play Topaz, starring Junkichi Orimoto, Kobo Abe was initially tasked with writing the screenplay, and had already completed a first draft. However, due to differences with Ichikawa, who had been appointed director, Abe's abstract script was not adopted. Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, quickly completed the script, and [cartoonist] Taizo Yokoyama and others contributed their opinions and ideas to the final screenplay, and are credited as scriptwriters…

This film does not have a director's name credit. Initially, it was to be distributed by Shochiku, but, after many twists and turns, it was eventually distributed by Shintoho. However, the producers agreed to cut the final scene, depicting the explosion of the atomic bomb, a blend of reality and hallucination, without Ichikawa's consent. This led Ichikawa to protest and refuse to have his name credited as director... Ichikawa later testified that the reasons for his removal from the credits were that the Young Actors' Club, the producers, had begun production without completing fundraising and were enthusiastic about it, and that it was Ichikawa's first independent production job and he had proceeded with filming without understanding the circumstances.

However, the version I saw does have a credit for Ichikawa as director, so I’m uncertain whether the Wikipedia article is incorrect or the credit was added to later prints. It’s perhaps also worth noting that, though many sources credit Ichikawa as a screenwriter, the film itself does not. 

 

Yunosuke Ito

Anyway, given the circumstances in which it was made, it’s perhaps not too surprising that the resultant film is a messy affair, albeit quite an enjoyable one with sterling work all around from an excellent cast. Though it’s a wacky satirical comedy in the vein of other Ichikawa films such as Pu-san (1953) and The Crowded Train (1957), it gets surprisingly dark in places and the underlying message to Japanese cinemagoers in 1954 seems to have been that the post-war problems of over-population, unemployment, poverty, corruption and atomic weapons meant that they were all screwed. 

Thanks to A.K.

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English susbtitles) 

 

Escape at Dawn / 暁の脱走 / Akatsuki no dasso (1950)

 

Yoshiko Yamaguchi

 

1945. Harumi (Yoshiko Yamaguchi) is a singer in a troupe of female entertainers sent to Manchuria to help the Japanese soldiers forget about their probable imminent deaths. Unfortunately, she quickly attracts the attention of overbearing Lieutenant Narita (Eitaro Ozawa) and is about to be raped by him when Private First Class Mikami (Ryo Ikebe) knocks on the door to deliver a trivial telegram to Narita, allowing Harumi to escape. Harumi and Mikami fall in love, but, when he's wounded in battle, circumstances lead to them being captured together by the Chinese. Mikami is treated with nothing but kindness by his captors, but he’s been completely brainwashed by the Japanese military propaganda machine into thinking that it’s better to die than be taken prisoner…

 

Eitaro Ozawa and Yamaguchi

Produced by Shintoho, the company founded by those who split from Toho after the studio’s big labour dispute of 1947, Escape at Dawn was nevertheless distributed by Toho. Like director Senkichi Taniguchi’s previous film, Jakoman and Tetsu, it was also produced by Tomoyuki Tanaka and co-written by Akira Kurosawa. In this case, the source was a 1947 novel by Taijiro Tamiya (1911-83) entitled Shunpu den (‘The Story of a Prostitute’, not available in English). Tamiya had served in Manchuria during the war (as had Taniguchi) and also written Nikutai no mon (‘The Gate of Flesh’), first filmed in 1948 by Masahiro Makino and later by Seijin Suzuki, Hideo Gosha and others. 

 

Ryo Ikebe

 

Although Tamiya is said to have created the character of Harumi with Yoshiko (later Shirley) Yamaguchi in mind, in the novel she was a Korean prostitute (or ‘comfort woman’), while it’s made very clear in the film that she is not a prostitute, and she has also become Japanese. Apparently, the original version of the screenplay was faithful to the novel on these points, but the content of Japanese films was still being controlled by the occupying Americans, who insisted that changes be made. It’s hard to see how such whitewashing benefitted the Americans, so their decision was presumably just a case of them imposing their own cultural nanny-state ideas of the time about the depiction of ‘immorality’ on screen. An unfortunate knock-on effect was that Harumi’s behaviour in the way she throws herself at Mikami and won’t take no for an answer now appeared extremely odd coming from a Japanese singer rather than a Korean prostitute. According to Stuart Galbraith IV in his book The Emperor and The Wolf, Kurosawa eventually got fed up with the requests for endless rewrites and left Taniguchi to it. He also states that,

…long preproduction, expensive exterior sets, and tangled red tape to secure permission for use of military hardware for filming (machine guns, etc) made it the most expensive Japanese feature to that point.

I’ve read elsewhere that it was also the first post-war Japanese film to feature scenes of Japanese soldiers on the frontlines. In any case, while it’s certainly a compromised vision, the film is at least very well-made and often technically impressive, with cinematographer Akira Mimura winning a Mainichi Film Concours award for his efforts. On the other hand, the essentially simple story of a predictably doomed romance feels overstretched at almost two hours. As Lieutenant Narita and his men are stationed in the desert, the film is very much like a Japanese Foreign Legion movie, and memories of Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in Morocco (1930) are often brought to mind. There are some surprisingly sensual scenes between stars Yoshiko Yamaguchi and Ryo Ikebe – at one point, she bites his hand hard enough to draw blood, then sucks the wound, which he seems to enjoy. This would have been considered strong stuff in Japan in 1950 and probably helped at the box office.

Seijun Suzuki directed a more faithful version of the original novel in 1965.

Bonus trivia:

Setsuko Wakayama, who plays one of Harumi’s colleagues, had married director Senkichi Taniguchi in 1949, but they divorced in 1956 when he had an affair with actress Kaoru Yachigusa. This adultery scandal harmed Taniguchi’s career greatly – after directing an average of three films a year until 1957, he was subsequently out of work for over two years. When he did return to directing, the quality of the material he was offered was significantly lower than it had been before the scandal.

 

Setsuko Wakayama

DVD at Amazon Japan (no English subtitles)

Ten no yugao / 天の夕顔 (‘A Moonflower in Heaven,’ 1948)

 

Mieko Takamine

 

Toyohiko Fujikawa

Tatsunoguchi (Toyohiko Fujikawa) is a recluse who lives in a hut on a snowy mountain and shoots rabbits for his dinner. One day when out hunting, he notices a man (Haruo Tanaka) lying in the snow. The man is still alive and asks Tatsunoguchi to leave him there, but he takes him to his hut and nurses him back to health. It emerges that the man had wanted to die due to a love affair that went wrong, so Tatsunoguchi begins to tell him his own story of how he ended up living in such isolation.

 

 

As a student, every Friday Tatsunoguchi had passed a young woman, Akiko (Mieko Takamine), on his way to university and gradually fallen in love with her. However, the encounters suddenly ceased and, when he did finally run into her again three years later, she had already acquired both a husband and an infant son, although her marriage was a failure. Akiko reciprocated Tatsunoguchi’s feelings, so their love continued to grow, resulting in an on-and-off relationship that could only ever be platonic dragging on for years and leading to Tatsunoguchi's eventual self-exile to the mountain…

 

 

This Shintoho production was based on a 1938 novel of the same name by Yoichi Nakagawa (1897-1994) and is the only film adaptation of his work to date. According to Japanese Wikipedia, the novel ‘garnered high praise in Western Europe as a masterpiece of romantic literature, comparable to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. After the war, it was translated into six languages, including English, French, German, and Chinese, and was highly praised by Albert Camus.’ We also learn that Nakagawa got the story upon which he based his book from a masseur named Kozaburo Fujiki, who greatly resented the fact that Nakagawa refused to give him any credit. A feud between the two men lasted for decades, culminating in the self-publication of a 1976 book by Fujiki with the splendid title The Great Achievement of Shattering the Masterpiece Ten no yugao - A Guide for Reading Novels Carefully and with Taste.

 

 

This literary feud is arguably more entertaining than the film itself, which is an extremely maudlin piece of work, an aspect emphasized by the keening violin featured excessively  throughout composer Fumio Hayasaka’s score. Director Yutaka Abe had already made around 60 films at this point, and went on to make The Makioka Sisters (1950) and Confession (1956). He certainly does a competent job, but the material is so old-fashioned and sentimental that it has dated very badly indeed and is at times even laughable today - the animated firework near the end being an especially corny touch. 

 

 

Leading lady Mieko Takamine will be familiar to many readers, but who, you may well wonder, was her co-star, Toyohiko Fujikawa? Well, he seems to have been born in 1924 and has just two other credits, both in Daiei movies from 1950. According to @Shimo_x2 on x.com, he ‘was not originally an actor but a young president of a construction company. It seems he also invested in this film, making his appearance in the movie something of a hobby.’ In any case, he gives a slightly stolid but perfectly acceptable performance and certainly looks the part of a leading man. 

 

 

This film appears to lack an official English title, but is sometimes listed as ‘The Beauty of the Evening Sky.’ However, the first kanji can be interpreted as ‘heaven’ as well as ‘sky’ and, while夕on its own means ‘evening’ and 顔 can mean ‘face’ (but not ‘beauty’), the final two together mean ‘moonflower’, and there is in fact a scene in which Mieko Takamine admires a moonflower (ipomoea alba), which bloom at dusk and last only for one night. The English translation of the book by Akira Ota published by The Hokuseido Press in 1949 is also titled A Moonflower in Heaven. The cover art is by Jean Cocteau.

Watched with dodgy subtitles.